Articles by Joseph Romm

2007 was the year of splitting the difference

The triumph, for yet another year, of those who want to split the difference and, basically, do nothing (i.e. those whose key climate strategy is to invest in good ole technology or at least to say they want to invest in technology) -- this means you President Bush, Newt Gingrich, Bjørn Lomborg, OPEC (!), Shellenberger and Nordhaus (depending on what day you happen to catch them), and possibly Andy Revkin (and maybe even E. O. Wilson -- say it ain't so!)

By the way, the (lame) outcome of the energy bill ought to make VERY clear that funding clean energy technology at the level it deserves ($10+ billion a year) is NOT politically easier than regulating carbon (contrary to what Shellenberger and Nordhaus keep saying).

Conservatives hate both strategies -- and we will certainly need the money from the auctioning of carbon permits to pay for the technology, since it is now clearer than ever that such money won't come from 1) raising taxes [as if] or 2) shifting money away from huge government oil subsidies even when oil is at $90+ a barrel!

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

PNG agrees to let palm-oil producers raze rainforest

Everyone at Bali cheered when the Papua New Guinea delegate dissed the Bush team:

We seek your leadership. But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way.

Oh, snap! [Sorry, couldn't resist one last 2007 Daily Show-ism]

Now comes the heartbreaking news:

Venture-capital star ain’t no clean-tech expert

Vinod Khosla may be a "venture-capital star" who is now putting a lot of money into biofuels -- but he is no clean-tech expert, as he proved during a keynote address at ThinkEquity Partners' ThinkGreen conference in San Francisco. In remarks that should worry anybody relying on his judgment, Khosla said:

Forget plug-ins. They are nice toys. But they will not be material to climate change.

Republicans have every reason to share ownership of the climate issue

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

In Part I, we saw how conservatives were turning their backs on the moral issue of our time -- global warming.

Here we'll examine the many reasons conservatives should share ownership of this issue. Global warming and its solutions involve issues that are important to conservatives, progressives, Independents and even political agnostics. For example:

National security: "Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world, and it presents significant national security challenges for the United States," 11 retired admirals and generals concluded in a security analysis last April. "The increasing risks from climate change should be addressed now because they will almost certainly get worse if we delay."

Jobs: The global need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is arguably the biggest entrepreneurial opportunity the United States has known. Billions of the world's people need access to clean energy, a market of unprecedented scale. Here in the United States, according to an analysis by the Management Information Services in Washington, D.C., energy efficiency and renewable energy can create 40 million jobs by mid-century, at skill levels stretching from entry level to the highly technical.